Does anyone know much about the MAT entrance exam for Maths at Imperial & Oxford?

[FancyDan]

We went to the open day at Imperial today as my son wants to study maths there.
He also wants to apply to Cambridge so has to apply by the 15th October.
If applying by this date the MAT exam is compulsory at Imperial (if you're applying later the STEP exam can be used).
My son wasn't aware of this and is now worried that he'll have to study for the MAT & STEP exams as well as his A level subjects.

The person we spoke to at Imperial said that the exam was a combination of the Maths and Further Maths that students would have studied in year 12 but my son doesn't start further maths until September!
Will he be disadvantaged by this or will everyone be in the same boat?

If you have the predicted A level grades, do they use the result of this to decide who to invite to interview or do you just need to meet a particular percentage to pass?

Why is it so complicated!

Well,@Purpleconcreteroad , what has your DD got to lose by registering her interest? This programme can be immensely valuable for girls from all backgrounds.

I do think talented girls with less exposure to HE and STEM role models in their personal lives have greater need, and prioritising them makes sense. Ironically, however, they can be hardest to reach. I would bet the participants come from various backgrounds.

Don't try and play the odds game. They are always going to look quite daunting. Give it a go. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn't, but if you don't try then there's no chance at all.

Oh yes, totally agree that you have to have a go at things; nothing ventured, nothing gained. But having some mind to the chances can help moderate the disappointment later.

It may interest some people to know that Birmingham, Cardiff, Lancaster, Loughborough Nottingham Sheffield and York all currently have places for maths in clearing (not guaranteed that they will next year, but it's a good indicator). York wasn't mentioned before on this thread but only requires an A in single maths, and is on par with several of the others that have been mentioned above.

I dug up the mean UCAS pts of the cohort, the offer/acceptance rate (acceptance for oxbridge, offer rate for the others; not all were available), and the "GPA" from the 2021 Research excellence framework as an indicator of the research quality. Sorted first by maths entry requirement, then by UCAS pts, this gives the attached (hopefully!) table.
In terms of competitiveness and ability of cohort on entry, Cambridge is out on its own but there's very little difference in the ability of the cohorts at Oxford and Imperial - they're closer to each other than to Cambridge or Warwick. Imperial is much harder to get into than those outside the top 3.
Warwick seems more on par with Durham and UCL but the high offer rate may be because if you do badly in MAT, your offer is made conditional on STEP. Warwick is significantly ahead of Durham and UCL in terms of research quality, which could be argued to trickle down to undergrad teaching.
Once outside the top 6, the (available) offer rates shoot up to > 85%. So if you've taken the right A levels, have achieved/predicted grades that match or exceed the standard offer, and your PS does not reveal you to be a lunatic, you'll very likely get an offer. It would be prudent for even very strong candidates to include at least one "insurance" choice outside the top 6 in their 5 UCAS choices to reduce the chance of a clean sweep of rejections.

Thanks for the detail, @EctopicSpleen . I don't have any skin in the game anymore as my 2 DSes have now graduated from Warwick and Manchester, but it's still interesting!

Out of interest I looked up the REF results @EctopicSpleen referred to. No metric is perfect but a lot of effort goes into making REF an objective measurement of research strength, and this does have advantages for undergraduates. The Maths Top 10, in order,
from 2021 are

Oxford
Cambridge
Imperial
Bristol
Glasgow
Warwick
Lancaster
Manchester
Edinburgh + Heriot Watt, joint submission and tied for 9th

Some surprises there

One message that could be taken from it is that those who are willing to look further north or west (either Scotland or e.g. Bristol/Manchester/Lancaster), should be able to get a place on a maths degree in a highly ranked, research-intensive department, without needing to have further maths A level. (Further maths as an indicator of the north-south divide?...)

At some of these places , probably, @EctopicSpleen I am still convinced that the key question is how many of the cohort have FM rather than whether it is required.
Once that % is more than about half, the teaching changes and those who lack it often lose confidence. (FM material is covered, but very quickly).

This information is available online.

Background - my career was in software engineering and I am that old that I have a Maths degree myself.
I was on a "girls in coding" (or some such) day with a couple of our talented graduate engineers, both women from the old Eastern Bloc who had done the Bacc. They pointed out that this meant it was a lot harder to rule yourself out of degree courses by what you did or didn't take, a good point I thought.

It is a great point @Paperbagsaremine . The Bacc (mainly the IB in England) has a lot to recommend it. So does the Scottish system IMO. Making professionally limiting choices at 16 seems a bit weird to me, but then I didn’t do it either

I went to the open day at Cambridge today and the maths professor who gave a talk about the admission process said that in the interview they say hello and then it's maths, maths, maths for the remainder of the 30 minute interview, ie a maths test.
I would have expected that at least some of the interview would have been discussing your personal statement.
If you never get asked about your personal statement what's to prevent students from either exaggerating their supercurricular activities or downright lying about them?

With respect to young women and Further Maths, I have a DD and a DS who have taken FM, both in the context of a mix of humanities and STEM A levels. In my experience, there are several factors at play.

At my DCs' comp school, the small and typically very bright band of aspirant medics steer away from FM for fear time on that dents potential grades in other subjects; a high proportion are young women. Most end up not being medics and many actually change their mind prior to uni but obviously the FM ship has already sailed.

A similar effect is evident where humanity/arts subjects are part of the A level mix; again, there can be a female bias. Encouragement, even pressure, to take an EPQ (despite the fact that many subjects can have an NEA component, testing the same skills) can an additional disincentive to take on FM.

I have seen my DC benefit from taking FM in ways I had not anticipated. It has not been a time drain or grade sapper as some students, parents, even teachers sometimes fear. It has definitely supported and enhanced performance in other STEM and non-STEM subjects, mainly because it really develops logical thinking. I would like to see more young women take up FM and I did get irritated when other parents thought it 'brave' that DD did FM but not so brave for DS.

On other points, I see that the TMUA will not run after this Autumn. It might be replaced in a like-for-like format; I hope so as its real benefit is that you decide whether you want to release the result to unis after you have received them; this was a deliberate aspect of the TMUA architecture as it encourages students to have a go because there is no down side - that encourages less confident students, whether female or male, to take part.

Further to the recent posts from @FancyDan and @PerpetualOptimist

Admissions tutors well understand the temptation to exaggerate on the PS. Furthermore, the extent to which it is the applicant’s own writing is quite variable. So in STEM (I am excluding Medicine which might be different) the tutors I’ve known (who are all RG) ignore all but the most basic factual information. Okay, Oxbridge want supracurriculars so there is a paradox. Also, Cambridge simply wants the best mathematicians and STEP will catch them out better than a human can.

@PerpetualOptimist I have always wondered about the relative merits of doing Maths in Y12 and FM in Y13 vs doing the two in parallel. I had not known about the issues you have just brought up. You’ve made a strong case for the former possibly bringing more girls into the subject.

My DS studies at Imperial and he and his friends all do on-line tutoring to manage the cost of living commuting distance to S Kensington.

This child of mine is swanning around Europe so I cannot ask him which site - but my guess is there are several. He has to be DBS tested and interviewed so I suspect the standard is good.

The tutoring site is my tutor. i bet you can find help there

On your point, @poetryandwine, about M/FM in 'sequence' (ie Y12 M then Y13 FM) or in 'parallel', yes, I definitely favour the latter precisely because it allows more students to experiment with FM from the outset and so is one less barrier to female participation.

The parallel approach is used at my DCs' school and it was definitely a factor when my DC (both DD and DS) made their choices as neither, in Y11, saw themselves as particularly strong on the maths front.

In addition, at our school the parallel route more easily allowed students with a mix of STEM and humanities to take FM. The risk with the sequential approach is that it becomes dominated by STEM only and, within that, the often male-focused M/FM/Phys/CS combo.

"Oxbridge want supracurriculars so there is a paradox. Also, Cambridge simply wants the best mathematicians and STEP will catch them out better than a human can."
I agree. the other paradoxes students must navigate are:

1. the top few universities in the UK expect a maniacal focus on degree subject from age 16 whereas world-class universities in other countries want breadth and extracurriculars, and ultimately produce specialists who achieve equally well. So what has the premature specialisation really achieved except to exclude those who didn't fancy e.g. maths after a tedious lower school experience, leading them to drop the subject before they really knew what it was about?
2. very able students are held back up till GCSE/Y11, with schools using the pretext of being "well-rounded", but are then expected to drop everything, spend 2/3 or their time on maths and achieve 3 years of progress in about 18 months in order to have a fighting chance of getting through MAT/STEP. That process doesn't necessarily select those with the most creativity/potential, but rather those who are most organised/facilitated or the minority who happen to have decided at 16 what direction they want to go.

Quick response, but sorry I wasn't there for the open day (Marking!). When interviewing we do read through the PS but do tend to spend all the time in interview asking maths questions as this is more useful to us for seeing if you are right for the course (and the course is right for you!).

Some colleges might ask a "friendly warm-up" question from the PS, so don't lie as you might be caught out (for example, don't say that you love to parachute as your interviewer might be a parachutist). A lot of colleges won't though.

However, applicants also apply to other universities who might use the PS more in terms of making offers!

I tend to see the PS as a "can you be bothered" test - did the applicant spend some time making sure it was spell/grammar checked and is readable (don't try and be clever and use long works - maths is also about communication so being able to have a readable PS is not a bad idea). If they were lazy in preparing the PS then they might be lazy in other aspects...

If you are happy to, please do PM me and let me know who the maths professor is (out of curiosity !

Back in my day (haha) they mainly wanted to know:
a) were you good enough at Maths for them?
b) that you were neither terminally annoying nor a nervous wreck (as they were facing 3 years of you if you were given a place)
I'm sure exceptional personal attributes like "On the Olympic rowing team" might have had a tiny bit of influence, but beyond that, no. In fact one of my fellow mathematicians in college was tartly and goodhumouredly reminded that, in order to row for the college, he had to be a member of the college, and to that end needed to do enough work to pass the exams ;)

Our household is awaiting STEP results next month. DS did sit MAT, didn't get around to adding Imperial and Warwick to his UCAS application till later so then had to find out how to let them know that he had done MAT so they could consider him on that basis. He did get "STEP-free" offers from both which felt like a benefit.

Looking up the details a while back, I did note though that both Warwick and Imperial stated that a typical offer, if it asked for STEP, would want a 2 in one paper. Which is quite a contrast from getting 1 in both papers for the Cambridge offers. So if someone hadn't sat MAT, I would hope that STEP shouldn't be a stumbling block for universities other than Cambridge.

DS had the luxury of being at a school that could teach its top maths class without reference to syllabus; so I understand he found MAT preparation fairly straightforward. I don't think he did much for STEP prior to the summer after yr 12, but he then prioritised it increasingly from about November onwards. When he first had a go, questions took him ages, but after a while it started to speed up. Anyone supporting a student starting STEP preparation - please don't let the get disheartened! The more questions you do, the greater your fluency which then makes you faster.

Hi @EctopicSpleen
What other UK universities (ie Scottish, Welsh,NI) would make it into this list and where would they sit.
I'm happy to get your educated guess if you're not sure 😀.
Thanks

Agree completely about STEP preparation, @OxbridgeHopeful I did say that I think far more than 50% of Cambridge applicants could make their offers. Of course they can’t as long as Cambridge makes two offers for each place and sets the boundaries accordingly; I meant that when I have done STEM schools outreach a large number of pupils are really naive or blase about STEP and don’t prepare until too late.

I hope your DS gets good news.

@FancyDan I am not precisely sure what qualities you sre looking for, but in terms of data the hidden gem of UK maths in terms of what is on offer appears to be Glasgow: it ranked 5th in the 2021 Research Exercise Framework (the latest) and 5th in the Guardian League Table 2023. The GLT is often maligned as it leaves out the research strength of the unit and puts weight on the National Student Survey, teaching quality, value added, etc.

Obviously Glasgow isn’t as competitive for entrance as the SoMs we’ve been discussing but this data is very impressive. Bristol is another one, but less surprising I think.

These are also two fine cities IMO. Another option with a very fine SoM in a great city is Bath. It does not have the research strength of Glasgow and Bristol but UG admission is highly competitive — certainly more so than Glasgow. And students there seem very happy.

@FancyDan Bear in mind the discussion was focusing on the "top" institutions. the Northern Irish and other Welsh unis would be mostly below. Queen's Belfast could be argued to be on par with the other institutions requiring an A in maths - it gets some very able NI students who don't want (or aren't encouraged) to go for oxbridge. Swansea is further down most league tables.

Where the Scottish unis would fit in is tricky for several reasons: Advanced highers and highers both accumulate UCAS points, which invalidates UCAS points as an indicator of the ability of the cohort (at least in direct comparison to rest of UK). Also, several scottish unis have the option of entry to year 1 (With less qualifications but taking a year longer to get to BSc) or entry to year 2 bypassing year 1 (with higher grades). The latter option generally requires further maths whereas the former does not. the question then becomes: which entry point to compare?
In broad general terms: St Andrews, Edinburgh and Glasgow all rank highly. Not top 3. but in the top dozen. Those institutions will get a lot of the brightest scottish students as they tend to stay at home both for lower fees and cultural reasons. For 2nd year entry St Andrews and Edinburgh require A* in Mathematics and A in Further Mathematics. Glasgow appears to be slightly less competitive on entry but I can't see the equivalent info.
There is currently a "structural" distortion to admissions at the scottish unis because scottish government has capped the home/scottish funded student places. The unis are keen to get "rest of UK" and international students to make up their funding gap but I'm not sure how this is affecting competitiveness of admissions.